Volume 42, Number 20 · December 21, 1995
The Simple Art of Murder
By Joyce Carol Oates
Stories and Early Novels
by Raymond Chandler
Library of America, 1199 pp., $35.00
Later Novels and Other Writings
by Raymond Chandler
Library of America, 1076 pp., $35.00
The powerful appeal of certain forms of 'genre' stems from an apparent simplicity that, in the hands of inspired practitioners, rises to a kind of classic purity. There is an element of the parable, the fairy tale, even the ritual, which fuels such brilliant variants of genre as Henry James's The Turn of the Screw—a ghost story in the English tradition of which its author spoke with unusual disdain, virtually dismissing it as an inferior work. The abiding appeal of Edgar Allan Poe's hallucinatory tales of the arabesque and grotesque springs from their fevered, defiant unreality, the boldness with which, in appropriating the well-trodden Gothic tale, in particular the fables of E.T.A. Hoffmann, for his own commercial purposes, Poe jettisoned all semblance of individual psychology and sociological 'realism' in the service of another kind of vision. Only in his notebooks, in particular the remarkable prose pieces edited and published as The American Notebooks, is Nathaniel Hawthorne a realist; his novels and short stories are purposefully of the genre of 'romance,' ingeniously contrived moral allegories that yield numerous interpretations. In the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne helpfully defines not just the art of the romance but by implication all genre fiction:
Review, 6291 words
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